Thursday, April 6, 2006

Thoughts on Democracy

Should we really be surprised that your vote is no longer your own? Now it effectively belongs to whoever owns the media or some other factory of political authority. But this has happened before, so should we be surprised?

Every society must be built on something that begins with the people. No society can exist without the people contributing to it. With democracy we tried to formalize it and called the unit of contribution a vote. In it's natural state the unit of contribution is labour. So democracy, in the sense that all power originates from the people, is not only the natural state, but it is inescapable. Autocracy arises out of the way that the labour is organized. That is to say people can be organized to labour toward their own oppression. Likewise, people can be organized to vote in favour of their own oppression. Formal democracy seems like a small detour that ultimately leads to the age-old revolutionary cycle.